I'm currently testing vmware esxi 4 inside of Workstation 6.5.2.

I created a new VM and installed W2k3 R2 SP3 on this Virtual machine. After the installation the Task manager schows low CPU usage ( < 10%) and ESXi host shows also low CPU usage.

After that I installed MS SQL Server 2005 with SP3 on this VM and after I started the SQL Server the CPU usage in Task manager shows low usage ( < 15 %) but the ESXi host shows a CPU usage above 80%. When I stop the SQL Server service the CPU usage on the ESXi host is back to normal, which is similar to the Task Manager usage.

Is there an explanation for this behaviour?